Creating remarkable content has been an important aspect of effective marketing for a long time, primarily in the form of major media advertising, but the recent rise of search engines have increased the importance of creating remarkable web content. Content Rules by CC Chapman and Ann Handley explain how to effectively create web content that can result in measurable increases in marketing results.
Content Rules is a worthwhile read if you are new to marketing with web content and if you want to learn how you can leverage new media such as blogs, podcasts, and video to generate online leads that can turn into sales. The book provides a lot of practical tips that will help lower the learning curve and help you get started. There are several useful case studies at the end of the book that provide evidence of content marketing producing real results for some of the largest companies as well as small businesses. This book is packed with substance with relatively little fluff. If you are experienced in marketing with content there are still some useful ideas that can help you be more effective in content marketing.
Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:
“Produce really great stuff, and your customers will share and disseminate your message for you”
Creating great content that adds value to people’s lives will encourage readers to spread your ideas through email and social channels.
”What you create online will be searchable indefinitely”
If your content is deemed worthy by Google to be kept in their index, your article or content can show up in search results years after you have created it and continue to attract customers to your site.
”Give more valuable, helpful, and remarkable content to consumers than anyone else in my field.”
By creating more valuable content than your competitors you can establish your company as a thought leader which often leads to a perception that you are an industry leader.
”The key is to reuse and repurpose. Ask yourself, ‘How can we repurpose content development effortsto yield as many assets as possible?”
If someone at your company creates a valuable presentation, the content can be repurposed as a video, a webinar, or even an re-imagined as an article or ebook.
”Your content shares a resource, solves a problem, helps your customers do their jobs better, improves their lives, or makes them smarter”
A key to creating content that people will want to read, share, and link to is to focus on adding value to people’s lives.
”Provide the information that answers your prospects’ questions and concerns.”
Creating a frequently asked question section that links to a different page for each question can be a great way to answer questions from customers. People often use search phrases in the form of a question, so your FAQ page that matches a common question can help drive search traffic to your site from people who are actively looking for a solution.
“Your video content, in particular, is 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of search results than your standard text-based content.”
This statistic supports the opportunity of creating video for high search engine visibility. Since there are a lot fewer videos than text pages on the Web, you can increase your chances of ranking in search engines by producing relevant videos.
”Adding that single call to action, Make says, tripled the number of leads HubSpot generates from its blog.”
Hubspot adds a call to action to every blog post that moves the reader closer to becoming a customer by signing up for an upcoming webinar or downloading an ebook.